I'm surprised people actually buy this thing, and believe the words that are written. I had already been pissed about these authors, once I've run through their book 'The definitive book on body language', because even though it had some good points, most of them were ridiculous generalizations, and whenever a 'differences between men and women' section came up, I was about to rip my skin off. Ridiculous, nonsensical, sexist.
And there was also a ton of bullshit as well. Honestly, they say "The non-verbal expression of 'no' comes from how when the baby does not want to drink more milk from the mother's breasts". Okay, explain to me why the Bulgarians shake their heads IN THE OTHER DIRECTION THEN?

ARGH

But that is NOTHING compared to the atrocity that THIS book is. This is the BLUEPRINT of sexism. I was SO disgusted, that I just HAD to vent here. ALL of that book just pisses me off.

Of course, I could have just linked this atrocity against the human race. Same authors, same bullshit, same sexist remarks and blunt stereotypes. This is not a self-help book, this is brainwashing.

Last edited by Zhuinden on Sun Jun 23, 2013 2:55 pm; edited 3 times in total

It's just so disappointing, that people try so desperately to understand others, and they read self-help books that just reinforce stereotypes instead of trying to actually help people in understanding each other.

You are now at the forefront of a science which is relatively new and came out of its own dark fucking ages in living memory and is surrounded by a fog of wretched pseudoscience jumped on by the opportunistic and the gullible and who will appropriate your terminology for the sense of scientific legitimacy it brings. Well-aged sciences don't often have to worry about this shit. A botanist doesn't have to worry about people jumping up and selling pet theories about how ferns live on salt and their shape is the result of them adapting to dinosaurs sleeping on them. A chemist rarely has to worry about people 'discovering' that hydrogen peroxide bubbles on contact with blood because it is actually drawing out engrams lodged in your unconscious potassium memory.

But you are a psychologist in the age of the internet, where everyone's a psychologist and everyone thinks they intuitively understand the mind better than you and people are marketing flat fucking farce wearing various masks of legitimacy. Prepare to hear all about the TRUE differences between men and women. About mind hacks which will cause people to fall in love with you. About why you are western medicine chemical pushers out of sync with the Natural and Organic state of the mind. About brain hacks you can use to escape any sort of mental condition. Get ready for attachment therapists and "Neuro-Linguistic Programmers" and anthroposophic gestalt mind-analysis. Get ready to live in a world where the snake oil rules by attrition and noise. A world where you, like others in your field, have to let it reign because you're too busy with actually important shit, like helping PTSD sufferers and survivors of abuse, to argue about it on the internet.

it's me talking with my friends on the great day they became Real Psychologists and went into the field of helping trauma victims with the best known tools we actually have.

it's a testament to how this is a world full of bullshit piled on top of more bullshit, and psychology's candle in the dark is a much more feeble and reforming thing in a field that we as humans seem inclined to fill with a deeper and stinkier darkness than nearly any other field has to deal with.

Pseudopsychology is probably the most remarkable oversaturation of our already pop med saturated world. In a world in which you can sell homeopathy to people in spite of obvious and egregious basic chemical falsehoods, you can sell pseudopsych that wedges itself in the cracks of actuarial empirical understanding of our minds.

Oh my God, Sam! You just posted an unattributed quote from YOURSELF. Is it warm in your own anus this time of year?_________________Once, at a local NOW meeting where I was the only male among about a dozen women, a feminism trivia contest was held. I came in third.

Dang it. I kind of feel bad, because I read this book, really enjoyed it, and highly recommended it on this forum at one point. I wonder if you happened to have read one of my posts at one time and it was somewhere in your head when you got it. Or if it was a coincidence. Most likely a coincidence.

If at anything, it at least piqued my interest in the field and caused me to want to find out more.

Edit: Scratch that; it was the same authors, but it was titled "The Definitive Book of Body Language" as opposed to "The Language of Love". I don't know how similar they are though.

Dang it. I kind of feel bad, because I read this book, really enjoyed it, and highly recommended it on this forum at one point. I wonder if you happened to have read one of my posts at one time and it was somewhere in your head when you got it. Or if it was a coincidence. Most likely a coincidence.

If at anything, it at least piqued my interest in the field and caused me to want to find out more.

Edit: Scratch that; it was the same authors, but it was titled "The Definitive Book of Body Language" as opposed to "The Language of Love". I don't know how similar they are though.

Ah, well "The Language of Love" is pretty much the excerpt from that book's specifically sexist, overly generalized and stereotypical metacommunicational language, with even less half-truths as that book.

'The definitive guide to body language' is an abomination in a sense if you ask me, because it's a mixture of actually common body language gestures and emotional expressions (hey, the 7 basic emotions are fairly easily readable, considering they are mostly globally the same) with some actual facts that anyone could accept based on prior knowledge, but surrounded with the steaming pile of pseudo-facts and sexism in the form of assuming that all differences in behavior are because of genetic (biological, innate, not provable) origins, and how prehistoric humans, or more-so 'men hunted while the women gathered fruit'.

Imagine a food you've always wanted to eat, for example chocolate cake, and the sugar of it (humor) makes you believe it is delicious, but if you look more closely, you can see the infestation of worms wiggling around in half the bites. That's what the book is like. It's a nice read, and some of it is in fact informative, but once you inspect it more closely, you'll rather not want to just gobble it up without attention and precaution.

Imagine a food you've always wanted to eat, for example chocolate cake, and the sugar of it (humor) makes you believe it is delicious, but if you look more closely, you can see the infestation of worms wiggling around in half the bites. That's what the book is like. It's a nice read, and some of it is in fact informative, but once you inspect it more closely, you'll rather not want to just gobble it up without attention and precaution.